DAVID ANDRESS
David Andress is Professor of Modern History at the University of Portsmouth, where he has taught since 1994. Born and raised in south west London, he studied History at the University of York between 1987 and 1990, and returned there for a doctorate, awarded in 1995. He is an internationally-recognised expert on the French Revolution, and especially on the politics and culture of Paris during the upheavals of the 1790s. After writing several books focused directly on French events in these years, he has recently begun to diversify his publishing interests, and in 2008 produced 1789, his first work of international history. This explores that fateful year not just in France, but in Britain and its global empire, and in the nascent American Republic. He is currently working on a project to explore the British experience from the late 1790s to 1815, combining a history of the military and political struggles of the era with an examination of the internal strains on British society, the conflicting ideas that emerged, and their impact on the future development of nineteenth-century history. The working title for this is Conquering Napoleon: How a Generation of Warfare Transformed Britain.
He lives in Hampshire with his wife and two daughters, and mostly just tries to keep up.
LATEST BOOK: 1789: THE THRESHOLD OF THE MODERN AGE
In 1789 the world stood at the threshold of the modern age. While the French Revolution and the election of George Washington seemed to herald a new global order, Britain stood shocked at the new world unfolding before her. Two documents were drafted which would change the very meanings of citizens and statehood: the US Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The age of royal despotism had ended.
But beneath this veneer of progress, darker forces were at work: the French Revolution spiralled out of control, American slavery expanded and the armed forces of the British Empire were unleashed in India.
From 'mad' King George III to J.J. Rousseau and Thomas Paine, from Pitt the Younger to Robespierre, David Andress illuminates a world on the brink through the men who held its future in their hands.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age, (Little, Brown, UK 2008; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, USA 2009. The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution, (Little, Brown, UK 2005). vi + 424 pp. ISBN 03168 61812. US edition, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006; translation rights sold in China, Greece, Portugal, Spain. The French Revolution and the People, (Hambledon & London, UK 2004). Massacre at the Champ de Mars: Popular Dissent and Political Culture in the French Revolution, (Boydell Press for the Royal Historical Society, UK 2000). French Society in Revolution, 1789-1799, (Manchester University Press, UK 1999).
